Tuesday, February 28, 2017

How do we make sense of today's political divisions? In a wide-ranging conversation full of insight, historian Yuval Harari places our current turmoil in a broader context, against the ongoing disruption of our technology, climate, media — even our notion of what humanity is for. This is the first of a series of TED Dialogues, seeking a thoughtful response to escalating political divisiveness. Make time (just over an hour) for this fascinating discussion between Harari and TED curator Chris Anderson. ...

Harari's previous book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, explores what made homo sapiens the most successful species on the planet. His answer: We are the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in our imagination, such as gods, states, money, human rights, corporations and other "fictions," and we have developed a unique ability to use these stories to unify and organize groups and ensure cooperation. Sapiens has sold nearly five million copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and President Barack Obama have recommended it as a must-read.

At the end, Harari makes an argument that the Third World countries that suffered the most from globalism, imperialism, and industrialism in the last two centuries will also suffer the most from climate change.

His book has an impressively-broad scope, but his conclusions are wacky. Those countries have been huge beneficiaries of industrialization and the carbon-buring western civilization. They have gotten food, medicine, technology, knowledge, peacekeeping, and all sorts of other benefits. How have they suffered?

This talk shows him, as well as TED Talk management, to be extreme leftist globalists. He is an Israeli, which maybe explains some of his political views.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Cats host a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii that other research has linked to various mental illnesses. So, for some time, people have wondered whether cats are unsafe; for example, pregnant women are usually told to stay away from litter boxes. (They should still do this because transmission during pregnancy is very real.) In a study published in the journal Psychological Medicine, researchers looked at data that tracked 5,000 Brits born in the early '90s until they were 18. This included information about whether the kids grew up with cats, or whether there were cats around when the mother was pregnant. After the scientists controlled for factors like socioeconomic status, there was no link between developing psychosis and having owned a cat. The researchers suggest that previous studies that did show a link had relatively small sample sizes. In addition, many of these studies asked people whether they remembered having cats, which is not quite as accurate. That said, it's important to keep in mind that some mental disorders linked to the parasite -- like schizophrenia -- tend to be diagnosed fairly late in life, so only tracking until age 18 might limit the study.

Yes, I would be surprised if cats cause full-blown schizophrenia by age 18. The effects are more subtle than that, and some of them have been proven in animals.

In Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” he introduces research on social priming – the idea that subtle cues in the environment may have significant, reliable effects on behaviour. In that book, published in 2011, Kahneman writes “disbelief is not an option” about these results. Since then, the evidence against the reliability of social priming research has been mounting.

The results are eye-opening and jaw-dropping. The chapter cites 12 articles and 11 of the 12 articles have an R-Index below 50. The combined analysis of 31 studies reported in the 12 articles shows 100% significant results with average (median) observed power of 57% and an inflation rate of 43%. …readers of… “Thinking Fast and Slow” should not consider the presented studies as scientific evidence that subtle cues in their environment can have strong effects on their behavior outside their awareness.

In other words, his work relies on a flawed statistical analysis, and the claimed effects were not replicated in subsequent studies.

Fevered media speculation about Donald Trump’s psychological motivations and psychiatric diagnosis has recently encouraged mental health professionals to disregard the usual ethical constraints against diagnosing public figures at a distance. They have sponsored several petitions and a Feb. 14 letter to The New York Times suggesting that Mr. Trump is incapable, on psychiatric grounds, of serving as president.

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

ALLEN FRANCES
Coronado, Calif.

The writer, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV).

Maybe Frances should check whether he has one of those mental disorders.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Women are planning this weekend to protest a North Carolina billboard with a message they say is a slam on gender equality, according to media reports.

A billboard on a highway between Winston-Salem and Greensboro reads, "Real men provide. Real women appreciate it." It's on Business 40, a heavily traveled commuter stretch of an offshoot of Interstate 40 that runs between the two cities.

Winston-Salem boutique owner Molly Grace said that she sees the sign's message as an attempt to silence women who want to be seen as equals to men.

"It's absolutely, absolutely insulting to single mothers, to women who have careers whether they are small careers or big careers," Grace said.

I am not sure of the point of the billboard, but how is it insulting? Are these feminists saying that men should not provide? Or that women should not appreciate male providers? They are sick.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Much of the news media refuses to use the term "illegal alien", and saying things like "undocumented immigrant" instead.

Now I learn that ecologists use the terms "alien species" and "invasive species", with the main difference being that the latter term is used to imply harm.

And many ppl argue that illegal aliens are beneficial to the USA, because they supply cheap labor, drive down wages, and support Democrats. And they validate some silly poem about "wretched refuse" ppl.

So maybe we need a term like "invasive peoples" to convey harm. The main objection to illegal aliens is not that they are illegal or that they are alien; it is that they are intruders who are destroying the ecosystem. The term "wretched refuse", which seems popular among pro-immigration folks, seems too pejorative.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

NPR Radio Fresh Air just broadcast an episode on how the 1952 movie High Noon was made by a Communist. He knew the the Commies were evil but refused to testify about them and got a fat financial settlement.

The guest was pushing a book claiming that the movie was some sort of statement about Communism. In his view, the town was a metaphor for Hollywood, and its spineless amoral cowardly residents represent the leftist Jews who run the movie business.

The guest also complains about the Hollywood blacklist and President Trump.

I do not see this movie as creating sympathy for Communists and leftist Jews who refused to testify. I do not get whatever point the guest was making.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, as anti-communist sentiment gained ground in the United States, paranoia and persecution swept through Hollywood. The House Un-American Activities (HUAC) began interrogating some of the country's most talented filmmakers and actors, accusing them of being communists or communist sympathizers.

Author Glenn Frankel tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the government was "looking to see or to prove that there had been communist infiltration in Hollywood, that this was part of a mass plot engineered by Moscow to take over our cultural institutions."

Many who appeared before the HUAC were put on a blacklist that made it impossible for them to work in show business. Among the blacklisted was screenwriter Carl Foreman, whose 1952 classic western High Noon is seen as a parable about the toxic political climate of the time.

But as the program explains, Foreman was not blacklisted for appearing before the HUAC. He was blacklisted for being a Communist, for refusing to repudiate Communism, and for cowardly refusing to testify about Communist infiltration of Hollywood.

It may seem paranoid today to suggest that Hollywood filmmakers were communists or communist sympathizers, but this author confirms that Foreman was both. He was a member of the Communist Party, and he went to a lot of trouble to cover up for other Communists who were putting propaganda into films. Apparent Foremen himself was putting propaganda into High Noon, altho his thinking was apparently so twisted that most ppl missed it.

Ever hear anyone say that blacks are not properly represented in Hollywood? From this chart, it appears that black representation more closely matches the American population than other major groups. The underrepresented groups are Whites and Latinos.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Liberals may feel energized by a surge in political activism, and a unified stance against a president they see as irresponsible and even dangerous. But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right. In recent interviews, conservative voters said they felt assaulted by what they said was a kind of moral Bolshevism — the belief that the liberal vision for the country was the only right one. Disagreeing meant being publicly shamed.

Protests and righteous indignation on social media and in Hollywood may seem to liberals to be about policy and persuasion. But moderate conservatives say they are having the opposite effect, chipping away at their middle ground and pushing them closer to Mr. Trump.

“The name calling from the left is crazy,” said Bryce Youngquist, 34, who works in sales for a tech start-up in Mountain View, Calif., a liberal enclave where admitting you voted for Mr. Trump is a little like saying in the 1950s that you were gay. ...

“The Democratic Party has changed so much that I don’t even recognize it anymore,” she said. “These people are destroying our democracy. They are scarier to me than these Islamic terrorists. I feel absolutely disgusted with them and their antics. It strengthens people’s resolve in wanting to support President Trump. It really does.”

There has been a political re-alignment. The crazy left (aka the Ctrl-Left) is on one side, and Trump is on the other.

But the deep state is after larger game than General Flynn. It is out to bring down President Trump and abort any move to effect the sort of rapprochement with Russia that Ronald Reagan achieved.

For the deep state is deeply committed to Cold War II.

Hence, suddenly, we read reports of a Russian spy ship off the Connecticut, Delaware and Virginia coasts, of Russian jets buzzing a U.S. warship in the Black Sea, and Russian violations of Reagan’s INF treaty outlawing intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

Purpose: Stampede the White House into abandoning any idea of a detente with Russia. And it appears to be working. At a White House briefing Tuesday, Sean Spicer said, “President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to … return Crimea.”

Is the White House serious?

Putin could no more survive returning Crimea to Ukraine than Bibi Netanyahu could survive giving East Jerusalem back to Jordan.

A ton of folks are coming to Kjellberg’s aid after this whole thing, saying that The Journal has blown the whole thing out of proportion. Do you buy that?

Farhad: Well, if by “blown out of proportion” he means they accurately reported that he’s repeatedly invoked Nazi imagery and recently paid some folks to hold up a sign saying “Death to All Jews,” then I guess that’s right!

As I understand it, PewDiePie was paying ppl $5 to make distasteful statements, to see how far they would go. The WSJ is more Fake News. Disney is also pretty disgusting for going along with this.

Where could the demonizing and dehumanizing of the foreign born lead but to a whiter America? You have heard the lies ...

Think of the message sent if the “day without immigrants,” in which foreign-born workers stayed home, became a week or a month.

I guess it is saying that a "whiter America" would be the message, and the non-white interests that control the NY Times are against that. They advocate anti-white policies at every opportunity.

Of course these white-haters call Trump and his followers a racist at every opportunity. After his press conference last week, they were all calling him racist for how he offered to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. Or maybe it was for not recognizing the initials "CBC" in a black reporters question. Or maybe it was for thinking if someone is trying to get him to have a particular kind of meeting, then that someone might want to facilitate the meeting. I am not sure, as they mainly just use name-calling and do not explain themselves.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

I think that I am understanding the Israel-Arab situation better. The United Nations, Democrat Party, and various others propose a two-state solution. The ppl who live in what would be those two states are against it.

So here’s the substance: There are two prerequisites for peace that I laid out two years -- several years ago, and they haven’t changed.

First, the Palestinians must recognize the Jewish state. They have to stop calling for Israel’s destruction. They have to stop educating their people for Israel’s destruction.

Second, in any peace agreement, Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River. ...

Why do - - why are Jews called Jews? Well, the Chinese are called Chinese because they come from China. The Japanese are called Japanese because they come from Japan. Well, Jews are called Jews because they come from Judea. This is our ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea.

The Palestinian Arabs also have two demands: ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and unlimited Arab immigration into Israel.

Israel has repeatedly offered a separate state to the Palestinian Arabs, if it would bring peace, but they have rejected it every time.

In short, the Jews want an ethnic state like China and Japan, and the Palestinian Arabs want to exterminate the Jews.

Friday, February 17, 2017

A hearing in El Paso County in Texas went from ordinary to “unprecedented” last week when half a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at a courthouse where an undocumented woman was seeking a protective order against the boyfriend she accused of abusing her.

The woman, a citizen of Mexico who was living in El Paso had been driven to the courthouse by a victim’s advocate from the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence, a shelter for victims of domestic abuse where she had been living.

She left under arrest. ...

The woman had a prior criminal record and had been previously deported, ...

Last fall the undocumented immigrant filed her first of three police reports against her live-in boyfriend, whom she accused of punching, kicking and choking her, and of pulling her hair. A report from December alleged, according to Bernal, that after failing to stab her with a knife, the boyfriend threw the blade at her instead. He missed. ...

The ICE affidavit does not identify from whom they learned of the woman’s undocumented status, but it says the department “received information that an individual who had been previously deported was in the United States.” The information “mentioned” that the woman had filed a protective order against her boyfriend, who, at the time the affidavit was filed, was in custody for forgery of a financial instrument. The affidavit also states the exact time and place of the woman’s court hearing and that she was living at the domestic violence shelter.

Unprecedented? Now that there is a precedent, I hope to see more deportations of ppl like this.a

I hope I don't hear anyone say that she should be allowed to stay because she filed three police reports, or because tax-funded legal aid workers are assisting her.

Even if you want to help this poor woman, there is very little you can do for someone who keeps filing police reports against her boyfriend, but also keeps moving back in with him.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Following a discussion about the transition of power from the old American elite to what James Burnham called the managerial class, Francis describes the type of world the globalists want:

The culture the managers seek to build places more value on individual achievement and “merit” (defined largely as the ability to acquire and exercise managerial and technical skills) than on family inheritance, on sexual fulfillment than postponement of gratification and the breeding and rearing of children, on social mobility and advancement rather than identification with family, community, race, and nation.

But in addition to the family, the managerial class simply does not need other traditional institutional structures to maintain its power— not the local community, not religion, not traditional cultural and moral codes, not ethnic and racial identities, and not even the nation-state itself. Indeed, such institutions merely get in the way of managerial power. They represent barriers against which the managerial state, corporations, and other mass organizations are always bumping, and the sooner such barriers are leveled, the more reach and power the organizations, and the managerial elites that run them, will acquire.

So this is why they favor rootless cosmopolitanism and anti-family policies. These are goals that they have in common with cultural Marxism, though for their own reasons. This new version of leftist ideology fits their agenda quite well, and (at least in practice) it’s not too concerned with vast extremes of wealth, quite unlike old-school Socialism. So globalist plutocrats naturally latch onto something that lets them feel good about themselves and what they’re doing.

Her husband is nothing more than a plush betablob placeholder to grant legitimacy to his reckless Queen’s rule. He has the look of a man in pain. Physical pain as well as soul pain. His limbic system is constipated with suppressed and compacted emotions; you can tell he’s got something big to shout at the world, but he dare not lest his Queen cast him the icy gaze implying present and future sexlessness.

Christcucks are a scourge on Christianity, the Final Feminization of a once-great religion that is rapidly degenerating into a feelz therapy session for the racially alienated and the egotistically coddled. Jesus would, if he were alive today, lash them and strike them from His kingdom like he did the money-changers from the temple. He would know that Christcuckery isn’t love, but empty virtue signaling and moral posturing, much like the ostentatious shows of religiosity of the Pharisees that Jesus condemned in his day.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Following a discussion about the transition of power from the old American elite to what James Burnham called the managerial class, Francis describes the type of world the globalists want:

The culture the managers seek to build places more value on individual achievement and “merit” (defined largely as the ability to acquire and exercise managerial and technical skills) than on family inheritance, on sexual fulfillment than postponement of gratification and the breeding and rearing of children, on social mobility and advancement rather than identification with family, community, race, and nation.

But in addition to the family, the managerial class simply does not need other traditional institutional structures to maintain its power— not the local community, not religion, not traditional cultural and moral codes, not ethnic and racial identities, and not even the nation-state itself. Indeed, such institutions merely get in the way of managerial power. They represent barriers against which the managerial state, corporations, and other mass organizations are always bumping, and the sooner such barriers are leveled, the more reach and power the organizations, and the managerial elites that run them, will acquire.

So this is why they favor rootless cosmopolitanism and anti-family policies. These are goals that they have in common with cultural Marxism, though for their own reasons. This new version of leftist ideology fits their agenda quite well, and (at least in practice) it’s not too concerned with vast extremes of wealth, quite unlike old-school Socialism. So globalist plutocrats naturally latch onto something that lets them feel good about themselves and what they’re doing.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, is calling for governments to launch a public information campaign to fight the scourge of fake news, which is “killing people’s minds”.

In an impassioned plea, Mr Cook, boss of the world’s largest company, says that the epidemic of false reports “is a big problem in a lot of the world” and necessitates a crackdown by the authorities and technology firms.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph, he calls for a campaign similar to those that changed attitudes on the environment to educate the public on the threat posed by fabricated online stories.

Made-up news reports trying to promote a particular agenda gained huge traction on social media in the US during the election.

NPR radio news quoted this with approval.

Cook and NPR are on the Ctrl-Left, and they want to police the fake news. They are mad that they lost the election, and blame their loss on their failure to control the dissemination of info. Meanwhile, NPR broadcasts Trump-haters doing anti-Trump rants every day.

Monday, February 06, 2017

In Washington, D.C., revelers and protesters are marking the ascendance of a new president and the populist movement he says he has mobilized.

Some 1,600 miles away in San Antonio, thousands of psychologists from around the world are also marking the dawn of the Trump era by focusing their attention on the thought processes that prompt some people to resist and reject science. Matters for which there is a broad scientific consensus — including man-made climate change, the safety of childhood vaccines and Darwin’s theory of evolution — have been attacked as hoaxes and lies by senior members of the new administration.

Psychologists have come up with a name for this trend: the “anti-enlightenment movement.”

To better understand it, these professional observers of human behavior will draw from a recent election campaign in which fake news exploded, conspiracy theories flourished and derision was heaped on elites of all kinds.

“We were motivated by anxiety,” said social psychologist Matthew Hornsey, who organized a symposium on the issue for this weekend’s annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Is this a joke? Psychologists want to lecture us on scientific thinking and fake news?

Psychology, more than any other field, has been a big source of fake science news. More bogus research comes out of Psychology than anywhere. From the top universities on down, probably half the published papers are completely worthless.

It is also one of the most politicized. There are no social psychologists who are conservatives. I doubt that you could even find 1% of them who would use the term at all. Pretty much all psychologists live in some sort of bubble that is detached from science and reality.

Friday, February 03, 2017

According to the Cato Institute, the United States admitted 3,252,493 refugees between 1975 and 2015. Twenty of them were terrorists. This represents some 0.00062 percent of all refugees. Only three attacks carried out by these refugees were successful.

In total, in a span of forty years, “terrorist refugees” have killed three people in the United States.

But what about the attacks in San Bernardino, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, the Boston Marathon bombings, and 9/11? Are these not “proof” that such a ban is warranted? After all, the individuals responsible for the attacks had some connection to foreign countries.

In reality, the current executive order would have stopped exactly none of these attacks.

The Pulse Nightclub shooter was born in New York and was a U.S. citizen. Of the two San Bernardino shooters, one was born in Chicago. The other, his wife, was born in Pakistan and lived in Saudi Arabia — neither country is on the “banned” list. The Tsatnaev brothers, responsible for the Boston bombings, were born in Kyrgyzstan. People from Kyrgyzstan aren’t banned under the current executive order. Of the 19 people responsible for hijacking four airplanes on 9/11, 15 were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the UAE, one was from Egypt, and one was from Lebanon. Again, these countries aren’t on the “banned” list. ...

Yes, you are more likely to be killed by a gun-wielding toddler than a terrorist.

So we should let the Moslem refugees in, and jail the toddlers?!

No, this is an argument to extend the ban to other Moslem countries. And to deport the Moslems who are already here.

It is true that the govt can spend 2 years vetting a Moslem refugee, determine that he is not connected to any terror networks, let him become a citizen, and then his kid could become a Moslem terrorist.

Terrorism is just the most obvious problem. These refugees and migrants cause a long list of other problems. Just look at how Uber has exploited immigrants and turned them into America-haters.

I quickly learned that the White House had released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jews or anti-Semitism. Instead it bemoaned the “innocent victims.” ... the White House, by not referring to Jews, was acting in an “inclusive” manner.

The de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement, is what I term softcore Holocaust denial. ...

Softcore denial uses different tactics but has the same end-goal. (I use hardcore and softcore deliberately because I see denial as a form of historiographic pornography.) ...

What we saw from the White House was classic softcore denial. The Holocaust was de-Judaized. ...

Deborah Lipstadt is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

I first heard of her when she wrote a book arguing that Holocaust scholars should not debate or try to refute historians with alternative facts.

I guess she gets paid a big salary for sticking to her Holocaust views.

I just post this as info on what a Holocaust denier is. It might be someone who merely used inclusive terms for Holocaust victims.

Mr. Thiel weighed in on the controversy Saturday night, saying through a spokesman that he did not support a religious test for entry into America, “and the administration has not imposed one.” He was the only major figure in Silicon Valley to vocally support the president. ...

About 30,000 people apply for citizenship every year in New Zealand, where the population is less than five million, according to data from the country’s Internal Affairs Department. Only a handful — around one to two dozen a year — are approved for citizenship by the minister of internal affairs under “exceptional” circumstances, the data showed.

Mr. Thiel was one of those. In the application, he noted that he did not fulfill the residency requirements and said that he did not intend to live in the country if he secured citizenship.

Thiel wants to invest money there, but not live there. Who would have a problem with that? The fact that they are so restrictive about immigration makes it a better place to live.

Thursday, February 02, 2017

Doctors have been told to refer to expectant mothers as “pregnant people” so as not to offend transgender people, in official guidelines issued by the British Medical Association (BMA).

The controversial advice appears in a 14-page booklet on “inclusive language in the workplace” which also rules that the terms ‘biologically male’ and ‘biologically female’ are problematic, and instructs doctors to instead say that the individual was ‘assigned’ male or female at birth.

The union’s new guidelines come just weeks after it emerged that a British woman in the process of ‘transitioning’ gender put her operation on hold to have a baby, the Mail on Sunday reports.

775,000 women give birth in Britain each year, yet there are no other known cases of people in the process of ‘transition’ becoming pregnant.

Despite this, the BMA demands the word ‘mothers’ be dropped from doctors’ vocabularies in relation to pregnancy because it’s offensive to transgender people, and in order to “celebrate diversity”. ...

Members are advised against using ‘male-centric language’, an example of which is the instruction to use the term ‘family name’ instead of ‘surname’, the booklet noting that some linguists believe the latter word “may originate from sire-name, the name derived from one’s father”.

‘Christian name’ is another term the BMA say should be banished from doctors’ vocabularies, the guidelines stating that “to ask a Jewish or Muslim person their Christian name not only makes no sense, but is also highly disrespectful of their beliefs.”

In a section of the booklet relating to race, doctors are warned that “difficulties can arise with expressions that use ‘black’ in a negative way, eg ‘black sheep’, or ‘black mark’.”

This sounds like a joke, but it is not. I didn't even think that "black sheep" was a negative term. It means someone who is different from the crowd, but not necessarily worse. Maybe the BMA thinks that there is something inherently bad about being black or a mom.

I thought that "surname" just meant "last name".

The University of California at Berkeley used to be famous for its Free Speech Movement, but now it is famous for its Regressive Left using violence and arson to silence Milo expressing his opinion.